As Russia mobilises forces, Ukraine crisis already a war of disinformation
- Russian disinformation kicks into high gear as the Ukraine crisis drags on, US says
- Moscow has denied repeated accusations from West it plans to invade Ukraine
To hear Russian media tell it, the government of Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis waging a genocidal campaign against ethnic Russians in the country’s east, where Moscow-backed authorities regularly uncover mass graves full of the corpses of women and children with bound hands and bludgeoned heads even as they face the hell of constant shelling.
Such false images and narratives have become a daily staple in Russia in the months since an estimated 150,000 Russian troops, armoured vehicles, warplanes and naval ships began assembling around Ukraine’s periphery. The Russian media have gone into overdrive with stories depicting a government in Kyiv so cruel that Moscow has no choice but to swoop in and protect the ethnic Russians of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
“It’s a war between the Ukrainian government and its own people. … People are dying there every day. Thousands of civilians died there. Thousands of children lost their limbs there, buried in little coffins,” Margarita Simonyan, head of the state-funded broadcaster RT, said on a talk show on the Russia-1 channel.
“Go there once. … You’ll change your attitude completely. And you’ll understand that Russia can’t help but stopping this war. Do we have to wait until they organise concentration camps out there? Until they start poisoning their people with gas?”
Fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists has raged in the region since 2014 and killed more than 14,000 people. A tenuous ceasefire has been in place for some seven years, but both sides regularly accuse each other of violations.
Further amplifying the Russian rhetoric is a veritable army of Moscow-aligned digital activists and social media accounts. Their fabricated stories have added to the skyrocketing volume of online posts on the crisis in Ukraine, which has almost tripled in recent weeks, said Joe Ondrak, head of investigations at Logically, a London-based data analytics firm that tracks disinformation.